Chris McKay Narrates a Scene From ‘The Lego Batman Movie’

Those lines are shouted in a song introducing the brooding, blocky Caped Crusader in the opening of “The Lego Batman Movie.” The scene has Batman (voiced by Will Arnett) is fighting a gaggle of bad guys before squaring off with the Joker (voiced by Zach Galifianakis).

In an interview, the director Chris McKay discussed how the song came to be and why he decided to begin the movie with a climactic action sequence. Below are excerpts from that conversation.

Would you discuss this song that Batman is singing?

Batman, in the first movie, has a song, “Darkness, No Parents.” We loved the idea that Batman fancied himself to be a Marilyn Manson/Trent Reznor type, somewhere between industrial and rap. He saw himself as this warrior poet and writes these earnest, dark-feeling songs. In the original edit, the song was “Bodies,” by Drowning Pool. But the studio didn’t think that was going to play for a kid’s movie. So we brought in a bunch of guys to write stuff and the song we loved the most was from a songwriter named Cheap Shot, who wrote this really funny, but also really cool song.

The scene starts the movie off with a bang. What were your goals for it?

I wanted the beginning of our movie to feel like the third act of someone else’s movie. This is the third act of a Zack Snyder or Christopher Nolan Batman movie where there’s this threat that the city can’t do anything about and it’s the biggest thing Batman’s ever faced. I wanted the beginning of the movie to tell you about the world, to tell you about what other Batman movies would have done. I wanted to set this up for what you see after this scene, when Batman goes home and you see that he leads a lonely life.

Could you talk about the Joker in this scene?

Joker is the villain we love watching Batman fight. Batman and Joker have the central relationship of the Batman movies and comic books. I love this idea that Joker feels like this little brother who wants to show up his older brother but can never quite beat him. Joker sees himself as the bad guy version of Batman, but here Batman pulls the rug out from under him and doesn’t see it that way at all. We wanted Joker to be so vulnerable and look at them as having some kind of relationship. To have Batman deny that relationship like a bad boyfriend seemed like a lot of fun.